ABSTRACT
Cowper’s “On the Ice-Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean,” based loosely upon a newspaper report of 1799, not only raises prescient concerns about environmental catastrophes but also exhibits its author’s profound fears surrounding matters of personal salvation, agency, and artistic expression. The piece has received little direct commentary, and it joins “Hatred and Vengeance” and “The Cast-away” as one of Cowper’s great poems of religious anguish. Putatively a work about the appearance of icebergs in the North Sea, it pivots almost immediately to a far less certain internal landscape, marked by trepidation about the genesis of artistic expression and its aim. Cowper’s sympathetic identification with the ice-islands, extradited from their place of birth and drifting ever closer to their doom, reflects as well his certainty of rejection by God and exclusion from grace, hallmarks of the poet’s religious despair after 1773. Landscape here is superimposed upon and finally absorbed into a mental space, a process that manifests Cowper’s anxiety about the workings of consciousness and raises questions about the degree to which one may productively incorporate oneself into the art of landscape.
